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TV Year in Review: Tom Constabile, Associate Director of Content Strategy, Verizon

By Tom Constabile, Associate Director, Content Strategy, Development & Acquisition

December 22, 2015 | 5 min read

The below post is part of our 2015 TV Year in Review guest post series and is written by Tom Constabile, Associate Director, Content Strategy, Development & Acquisition, Verizon.

Ceilings Heightened for Live Streaming Concerts In 2015

To say 2015 was a “good” year for live streaming would be an understatement. In the past 365 days, we’ve seen live broadcasting apps Meerkat and Periscope become top downloads, League of Legends tournaments draw in live online audiences of over 27 million and Yahoo! deliver the first global NFL webcast. 2015 has been a banner year for live streaming experimentation and exploration across all content verticals.

2015 has led those inside and outside of the industry, whether they realize it or not, to a threshold of a tremendously exciting time for live streaming content where technical capabilities and consumer behavior are matching well. This pairing of technology and demand creates an exciting amount of runway for brands, sports, news outlets, music artists and venues looking to deliver live experiences.

A content vertical I want to spend some time on is live streaming music, as it’s a vertical my team and I are currently intensely focused on as it relates to our mobile video platform, go90.

175,000 viewers paid to watch the five-stop Grateful Dead farewell tour while Coachella garnered massive audiences through their live streams this year. Live streaming music was an especially exciting space to observe in 2015 as we saw a number of different business models present themselves, large investments made by companies like Tidal, Redbull, Yahoo and Apple Music as what some call “platform wars” intensified among major players. It’s hard to ignore these signs of the times.

Live streaming concerts have been proving themselves an avenue for artists to reach their most loyal fans. This path has been organically forged over the last decade or so with the last five years yielding exponential growth backed by festival broadcasts and interactive fan experiences on platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch.

LiveList is a super interesting company that has emerged this year that works to aggregate thousands of online live streaming performances and compiles them into one hub. Users can book shows they want to see and get notifications when they go live.

Production costs, securing rights to performances, fragmentation, appointment viewing and artist uncertainty still remain major challenges in the live streaming concert space, the last year has shown promise with chipping away at many of those barriers. So while companies like LiveList have been busy working through some of those fragmentation and discovery challenges online, brick and mortar venues like Pete Shapiro’s Brooklyn Bowl have been leading the way for making streaming online a cost-effective turnkey option for artists who play their venues.

This past year, my team and I here at go90 have launched two mobile streaming live concert series aimed at bringing premium live experiences to users wherever they are. In addition to premium live experiences, we work with artists to provide on-demand viewing opportunities for those who may have missed the performance and rewind and catch-up capabilities for those who may have tuned in a little late. It’s a tremendously exciting time to be working with this technology, these artists and their audiences to bring live concerts to mobile.

It’s worth pointing out that companies like Verizon have been committed to investing in deploying connected technologies, such as 4GLTE and Multicast and through our Digital Media Services business and our acquisition of Uplynk powering enterprise and emerging partners like LiveXLive, the world’s first premium, dedicated live music-streaming network to make seamless live experiences for artists, venues, brands and consumers possible.

Takeaway: In 2015, we didn’t quite enter the “Golden Era” of live streaming music, but the climate remained very ripe for experimentation and exploration. The technology and the consumer appetite were apparent in 2015, but we will see in 2016 if streaming live music shifts from a complementary to a core value proposition for brands and artists, which business models will prevail, what experiences consumers gravitate to from mobile on the go to virtual and immersive, how the industry will evolve as it relates to global rights, and how artist attitudes will shape best practices for this format. All in all, a very exciting time for live streaming music.

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